In the last year alone, generative AI has come a long way. First, ChatGPT amazed us with its power of text, and programs like Midjourney and DALL-E discovered how to create images from straightforward prompts. Others, like OpenAI’s Sora, can now generate video in the same way.
Perhaps that’s why I’m not surprised to learn that Google DeepMind researchers they have now created a program to generate 2D video games. Genie, as the researchers called the program, can actually make you: playable platformer, although it seems to take a bit more input to get there than, say, Midjourney takes to make a painting.
Genie was trained on over 200,000 hours of 2D platformer gameplay videos (all publicly available). This content teaches the bot the basics of 2D platformer design; it can even distinguish playable elements from immobile environments and interfaces. Genie can take drawings, animated graphics, real images and text descriptions to generate a game.
Before you get too impressed, look at some of the results. These Genie-generated games will not be appearing on the Nintendo eShop any time soon. In fact, they look pretty terrible. I think they look more like someone dreaming of playing a video game: the elements are blurry, the movement is brisk and jagged, and there isn’t much for the player to do Down. Plus, unlike many early AI projects, Genie isn’t user-available yet, so it’s impossible to say what the average performance is or how much refinement it took to get the samples we’re shown.
But the point is, this is it First we see the Genie. As you train and refine your model, its performance will undoubtedly improve. Will Genie ever be able to generate a full, playable game that you actually want to play? I don’t know. Will Sora ever be able to generate a full movie worth watching? These are questions that cannot yet be answered.
But the truth is that the better this technology gets, the more disturbing it becomes: Z layoffs are already hitting the gaming industry this yearI can’t imagine that AI-generated games will be good for employees.
